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KDE's KOffice Forks Internally As The Calligra Suite

Phoronix: KDE's KOffice Forks Internally As The Calligra Suite

The KDE community has announced the formation of the Calligra Suite, as a "continuation of the KOffice project" to reflect the larger KOffice package rather than just being an office and productivity suite. Calligra is meant to breath new life into the contained KDE programs after an unresolvable dispute by KOffice developers...

They shouldn't even have to create a custom renderer. Write the whole implementation as an XSLT which generates SVG from ODF - then the display of the document is just a webkit kpart. Is there anything you can do in ODF that would be difficult to generate an SVG representation of for display? I know you can get from LaTeX to SVG pretty easily. Lilypond generates ps or pdf too and they recently modified it to generate SVG directly.

Calligra isn't going to compete with much of anything if it maintains its dependance on KDE libraries. Unless it can isolate those dependencies to a kde integration plugin or library, we can't port koffice anyware and have it stick.

Write the whole implementation as an XSLT which generates SVG from ODF

Yeah, that's going to have really great performance, especially on a mobile phone.

Not to mention that a XSLT has to process the whole document, loading that 100 page document may take a while. Rendering the resulting .svg to a 100-page bitmap may be a bit taxing on your memory resources, too.

I'm also curious how you're going to implement intra-document links and the ability to copy/paste once everything has been transformed to svg.

Lastly, XSLT is a horrible language to write code in, writing a custom renderer is probably less work and way better for the sanity of everyone involved.

Calligra isn't going to compete with much of anything if it maintains its dependance on KDE libraries. Unless it can isolate those dependencies to a kde integration plugin or library, we can't port koffice anyware and have it stick.

What's the problem with installing kdelibs, if it all installs together and simple I think it would be no problem,
after all I think openoffice and msword are both bigger than kdelibs + koffice.
The main difference its that it feels dirty because libs are all across the system but it should be possible to put everything into a folder.

they saw libreoffice, and they are trying to copy. sadly koffice should just start from scratch. the current suite is a mess.

Erm, no. If you read the article (and the mailing lists where the decisions were actually made) you'd know this was in response to a conflict of interests among certain people. Long story short, the developers wanted to move AWAY from being a simple MS Office/OpenOffice/LibreOffice clone and a certain dickish maintainer didn't want this. So they forked the project and took the opportunity to create a new brand to reflect not only a new direction, but the fact that some applications (such as Krita, a painting application) simply didn't fall under the "office productivity suite" label.